they didn't address the trains and ships that haul coal, the supertankers that haul oil or the mining and shipping of lithium either
Sure, and they should. For a truly holistic analysis, you'd have to take all of that into account.
But an IC engine burns gasoline to generate electricity. That's the inefficiency they're addressing.
Then they just completely ignore the fact that the EV battery can't just charge itself, and that the coal-burning plant has its own inefficiencies. They're not even close to comparing apples-to-apples here.
The closest you can get to direct apples-to-apples attempting the simplicity of their analysis, is to compare efficiency of the gas ICE, to the efficiency of coal-burning electrical power generation, PLUS electrical line losses, PLUS losses from the battery to the wheels of the EV.
I've seen the analyses in detail before and the EV still tends to come out ahead, but it's not the same picture as the one they're painting.
It's really about how much CO2 is generated per mile. Transmission losses were taken into account and are surprisingly small (to me anyway). If you burn coal to generate electricity, I think the thermal efficiency is near 40%, but that comes out when you compute how much CO2 is generated per kWhr.
I once did a back of the envelop calculation on this and got about the same answer, a question was asked whether EVs really generate less CO2. There also is a factor of how much CO2 is generated in making an EV in the first place. It's pretty large, but comes out after a year or so of driving.
Line losses are 4-6%. I'm not sure I'd call that "small" when added to the thermal inefficiency of the coal burning plant, and then the losses from the EV battery to the wheels of the EV. There's really not as much difference as the EV industry attempts to portray.
But still, there is a difference.